1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for navigating a workspace.
2. Description of Related Art
As the amount of information in our lives continues to grow, people want new and effective ways of finding and using it. “Sensemaking” is a process of gathering, understanding, and using information for a purpose. Sensemaking tasks often involve searching for relevant documents and then extracting and reformulating information so that it can be better for utilizing the information. Making a report is an example of a sensemaking task. A sensemaker performing this task has many interrelated and possibly interwoven subtasks. One way or another, a sensemaker gathers information, identifies and extracts portions of it, organizes these portions for efficient use, and ultimately incorporates the information in a work product with the required logical and rhetorical structure.
Many kinds of information work involve workspace navigating, i.e., moving the focus of activity through a workspace. A workspace is one large space in which objects, such as text objects and/or other objects, are present at various locations. A workspace may be a two-dimensional workspace, in which objects have a defined positional relationship and are represented on a coplanar or substantially coplanar virtual surface that can be scrolled and/or panned on a computer monitor to bring the different places of the surface into view. Even a single document may be a workspace, with different portions of the document text considered as different objects. However, a workspace does not necessarily have to be two-dimensional, and may, for example, include a plurality of separate documents stored in a computer hard drive or the like, which a user can selectively access and view and/or edit. As another non-two-dimensional example, web pages linked by the Internet or another type of network, at which a user temporarily or permanently alters content, e.g., by engaging in interactive activities, leaving a message on a message board, or the like, may be considered a workspace.
When a user works on sensemaking using a computer, a user initially focuses on and works in one view place in the workspace and then from time to time moves to different view places, relating to the same or different subjects, within the same workspace. To move to different view places, because of limitations on the field of view of a screen, the user often pans or scrolls the view to access other view places in the workspace. The user often desires to go back to view and/or work in previous view places in the workspace.
Systems that support the action of returning to a previous view place in a workspace provide a way to mark, or “memorize,” places of interest and to go back to these places from subsequently visited places in the workspace.
For example, web browsers provide “bookmarks” for returning to previously visited web pages by storing locations, such as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) information of web pages of interest, and a “Back” button for returning sequentially to previously visited pages.
Such web browsers also provide a “Forward” button for allowing the user to move forward in sequence to previously visited web pages, after returning from those pages using the “Back” button.